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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

That's a pretty strange rule of thumb. Using twice as much water as rice (by volume) is much easier, not to mention infinitely more hygienic. Don't forget the salt.

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What is strange to you and me is common for hundreds of millions of people. It's strange to me that you're paranoid about touching rice which is going to be boiled for half an hour. You don't wash your hands before cooking? Not all rice needs salt either.

Boiling covers a multitude of hygienic sins, the worst of which happened to the rice long before it entered your kitchen. Birds, insects, and rodents have all pooped in and around it. Agriculture is filthy and there’s no way around it.

In the US, the primary reason raw cookie dough shouldn’t be eaten is not because of the raw eggs which these days are remarkably safe (but still not 100%), but more because of the latent ecoli/salmonella in the raw flour.

Fighting words. I suspect a substantial fraction of the world cooks rice by this knuckle method.

As for unhygienic, you do wash your rice, right? Your hands should already be in there.

Edit: Jo Koy explains how to cook rice with this method https://youtu.be/wMNLicO2cHw?t=107

We never wash rice before cooking it in our household. It's never a problem.

You do you, but there can be arsenic in rice, which is proven to cause cancer, so in other areas of the world, washing the rice is important.

Unfortunately washing rice doesn’t remove the arsenic[0], cooking it with a lot of water like pasta does that. You might still want to wash the rice to remove other contaminants, depending on the rice you use.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3CHsbNkr3c&pp=ygUEUmljZQ%3D...

The rice eating Asians I know have rice cookers and use measuring cups; 1 scoop of rice and 2 of water. As well, leaving it in the cooker means only having to cook 1x per day, usually.

With a rice cooker, you're supposed to use the measuring cups for the rice, not the water. You add water based on the markings on the bowl.

IIRC, rice cookers essentially use the extra water to implement a timer. They have a thermostat that trips based on the temperature rise that happens when the free water is absorbed or boiled off, and the levels are setup so that happens when the rice is done cooking.

> With a rice cooker, [...] You add water based on the markings on the bowl.

I think you mean "some" there instead of generalising because my rice cooker (Reishunger Mini Digital) manual explicitly gives water ratios using the provided cup.

See, e.g., page 30 of https://cdn.reishunger.com/Mini%20DRK_Bedienungsanleitung_Bo... (and page 25 if you want to verify that they only supply one measuring cup for use with both rice and water.)

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